Sunday, August 12, 2007

Robinson Cavalcanti: always a Socialist, never a conservative

Anglican bishop Robinson Cavalcanti, one of the most prominent leftists in the Brazilian Protestant church, has been mistakenly taken as a conservative. A light approach, in the tone of his speech, to the conservative ideals was enough to get one of his articles published in a major conservative website in Brazil. But not only Brazilians were misled. In the United States, something similar happened. Therefore, here is a warning: no, gentlemen, Anglican bishop Robinson Cavalcanti is not a conservative. He is and has always been a socialist.

Cavalcanti has certainly noticed that he has been taken as a conservative, because of his article against homosexuality, but until now he has made no statement to undo such misunderstanding. Could he be acting strategically? Presumably so.

A former politician militant of PT (Workers’ Party, founded by socialist president Lula), a pro-abortion and pro-homosexuality party allied with Latin American leftist terrorist groups like Colombian FARC and Sendero Luminoso in the Foro de São Paulo, Cavalcanti, who is also a political scientist, was the mentor and founder of MEP (Movimento Evangélico Progressista — Progressist Evangelical Movement), a NGO composed of leftist Christian militants. He has said that he left PT because he was elected as an Anglican bishop and also because, in his view, the party softened its socialist speech:

Since 1997, I am no longer a member of the Workers’ Party, because I was elected as an Anglican bishop. I have positive memoirs of my past of fights for the democratic State, for national sovereignty and for social justice. I also have increasingly negative perceptions of the ideological and programmatic rupture of that party. (Ultimato magazine, September/October 2004)

During the Lula’s reelection campaign in 2006, in the same sense, Cavalcanti wrote:

After wearing out me traveling throughout Brazil in the 1989 and 1994 electoral campaigns, I am surprised by Lula’s admission: “I have never been a leftist… As middle-class public official, college professor, retired, democratic socialist and evangelical socialist, I had no more reason to vote for Lula. (Ultimato magazine, January/February 2006)

It is worth to stress that Robinson Cavalcanti is not a conservative even in theological terms. He is one of the major references in Brazil when the subject is Integral Mission Theology, a Protestant version of the Liberation Theology, through which socialist militants transformed thousands of Latin American parishes in mere think-tanks of the political subversion. The worsening of the gayzist agitprop has left Cavalcanti alarmed, but even so he did not abandon the socialist ideenkleid. Openly, he has not done it. And even if he did so, those who know the history of communism know that after the public rejection of his old and vile ideals, a former militant should be under attentive observation. In the case of Cavalcanti, such attention is unnecessary, for he has not denied anything of what is in his books, articles and speeches, in which he merges and associates socialism and Christianity.

Robinson Cavalcanti’s theology, and some of his positions regarding the family and sexuality, also affront not only conservatism, but also the historical Christianity. On monogamy, he affirms:

The ideal exists, but its historical manifestation may hurt other so many divine ideals: sanity, love, faith, because monogamy can be, in many cases, just arithmetic (1+1) and no qualitative. The maintenance of others divine ideals has led, in turn, to the need of non-monogamic models that make possible the preservation and the promotion of those other values and ideas against the historical and short-run impossibility of the simultaneity of all the values (for example, Israel in the Old Testament). (E-book Libertação e Sexualidade [Liberation and Sexuality, pages 71 and 72)

Of course, he overlooks the biblical passage where Jesus Christ restates to Pharisees the irrevocable divine commandment: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his [one] wife: and they shall be one flesh. He also makes no mention of the pattern of Apostle Paul for bishops and deacons: husbands of one woman.

On the contrary, Cavalcanti’ concern is merely igualitarian, and it results in the assumption that God established impossible patterns of behavior which could not be lived throughout the History:

Is the divine ideal, from Eden, monogamic marriages? Yes, but for everybody. In other words, the requirement of that absolute model would be historically legitimate if, concomitantly, there were objective conditions so that everybody might enjoy it, leaving no one marriageless, just as, equally, the ideal couple in the Eden. It would not be theologically correct, or ethically honest, to require an aspect without taking into account the totality of the Creation order. (Liberation and Sexuality, page 72)

Here it is obvious the transposition of the “democratic socialist” mindset of Cavalcanti to the theological sphere, with all its spiritually and morally disastrous consequences. “It is not a sin only if everybody has a right to it”. But nothing supports that communistic reasoning in the Scriptures. “The social manifestations of sin, the perversions, as wars, epidemics, illnesses, accidents, inequalities and prejudices have made impossible the other side of that ideal”, the bishop declares in the following paragraph — as if the presence of sin in the world was able to relativize the divine commandment, the only source where one can understand the notion of sin itself. The irrationality of the assertion borders ridiculous.

That is the true and known Robinson Cavalcanti, although making good criticisms against the gay dictatorship (which, actually, he helped to build, for he always insisted that evangelical Brazilians had to support leftist candidates) and acknowledging that, ultimately, truth and absolute justice are in God’s hands. This is not enough to make him a conservative. In other words: he is an individual that makes compromises to ideologies, to the increasingly larger state interventionism and to the relativizing of spiritual and moral values. Cavalcanti is one additional example of those Christians that were influenced by the secular mindset in many of his positions.

A reprimand is left to the authentic conservatives: more attention, more discernment and more historical knowledge are necessary. Don’t believe immediately in any assertion of doubtful source, no matter how much it resembles the conservative postulates. The history of the world revolutionary movement is marked by hate and perversion disguised as charity and moral zeal. The left has no interest in speech, provided it is able to herd militants and sow the Gnostic and revolutionary urges in the soul of its listeners, with one objective: the revolution, the “new order”. Let us be attentive.